Nine Out of Ten With a Chest Infection: Why I Don't Trust Apple's Readiness Score
The first time my Apple Watch gave me a Readiness score of 4 out of 10, I was genuinely surprised. Four out of ten is forty per cent. To me, that's a low score, the sort that calls for some large adjustments to your day.
The thing is, I wasn't feeling that bad in and amongst myself. So I trained exactly as I'd planned to. But the number seemed rather shocking, to say the least.
Then, this past week, it gave me a 9 while I was properly ill. That has rather sharpened my thinking.
Here's where I've landed. The score is interesting. I'm curious about it. But it's a background piece of noise, and I'm much more interested in how I'm doing within myself.
Nine out of ten, with an infected chest
As I write this, I've spent a week very unwell, with an infected chest and nose, headaches and a very bad cold, shall we say. At no point did the Readiness score pick that up in any way, shape or form. It moved up and down a bit, maybe three points or so. I can't remember exactly. But none of those scores gave me much of a clue that I was ill. I knew I was ill because I was very unwell and unable to train. That was beyond obvious.
Then, yesterday morning, I got a 9 out of 10. That's massive. Apple's label for it is literally "Go For It". It would essentially mean go full throttle. I was still feeling really unwell, and whilst I did do some training, because I felt like I wanted to do something, I made it a lot lighter.
The disconnect was huge. The score is built on my body's signals, and those signals weren't catching a severely infected nose and chest. For me, that's just bonkers.
Yesterday afternoon I took a turn for the worse, with some nausea on top. This morning, the watch gave me a 1.
Nine to one, overnight. That's an extreme drop-off. And a 1 is probably very much where I'm at, so it has finally caught up. But this feels almost like a different illness from the one I've had all week. It isn't catching my symptoms early. If anything, it's catching them a lot later. To be fair, my Oura ring's score wasn't showing a lot of it either, which I guess is what you get.
I don't trust it enough to let it inform my training choices. Not in any deep way.
A day later, it was back up to a 7. That's another huge jump, and whilst I did feel a bit better, a 7 wasn't where I was at. Apple's reasoning was that my sleep score was high and my activity had been lower than usual for the past few days. Well, yes. I'd been in bed ill. Being too unwell to train was counted in my favour.
The problem with a score out of ten
My issue with a scale of ten is that there's a big jump between each number, and readiness is so much more granular than that.
I've much preferred Oura's approach of scoring out of a hundred, because it just looks better. A 76 would probably be an eight out of ten, but 76 feels very different from seeing a seven or an eight. There's something about the numbers and the way they're used here that just isn't quite working. I can't quite get my head around it, or get interested in it, or find it a valuable number.
So if it isn't going to be detailed enough, maybe it shouldn't be a number at all. A traffic light system, perhaps. Train as normal, think about reducing your training, or take a recovery or rest day.
To be fair, Apple does put a word under the number: Recover for 0 to 1, Pace Yourself for 2 to 4, Ready for 5 to 7, and Go For It for 8 to 10. But it's the big number your eye goes to, and the words are only as good as the score underneath them.
I'm aware these companies are very cautious about what they offer, and they aren't going to put out anything that could end up being seen as medical information. I get that. But as it stands, it's just not granular enough for what I'd want.
It's also weirdly hidden
To find the number, I have to open its own Readiness app on the watch, or go into the Fitness app on my phone and scroll right to the bottom. You can put it on your watch face as a complication, or in the Smart Stack, which does make a difference. But unless you set that up, I find it hidden.
Readiness in the Smart Stack on my Apple Watch Ultra 4
I don't love having to open an app or engage with something to get this information, whichever device it's on. With my Oura ring I can use an API to have it sent to me automatically, which is helpful, but that's a little bit of hacking. Otherwise it's into their app as well.
It would be better if Apple delivered it as a notification each morning. And if they were really going to go for it, one that was a bit more informative, even a little instructive. Though that only works if the data is valuable and useful in the first place. See above.
I've been here before
Years ago, I used to do a finger pulse and heart rate variability check every morning. What I learned is that I can be very diligent for a time, and really try to monitor my training in a different way. But it just became noise and numbers, with nothing tangible at the end of it.
I'm either too stubborn or I do have a sense of my own self. It's probably a bit of both. I'm going to do the training session, and if I'm a bit compromised, I'm a bit compromised.
Where it might help is reassurance. I don't want to be thinking about pace, but if the pace is down on what it might usually be, a low number lets me reassure myself that it's because I'm a bit more fatigued or ill.
I've always had this issue, though. These numbers can tell me one thing, but I can tell you another. I remember reading Mark Cavendish's autobiography, Boy Racer, many years ago, where he spoke about how his lab test numbers as a young sprint cyclist weren't that impressive. This is a man who went on to win 35 Tour de France stages, the all-time record, and a world road race title. The numbers don't tell you everything. They're just part of the picture.
That's how I see Readiness. It's a little more advanced than the check I used to do, because it uses heart rate variability but also temperature, breathing and general heart rate, and it's measured overnight. So there is more to it. But it isn't increasing the depth of information I'm actually taking in, and I'm not letting myself be dictated by it. I don't think I was back then, either.
Reassuring or distressing? It can be both
Could it help a charity marathon runner? I think it can do both, and that's the problem. It isn't an all-good or all-bad system.
On the good side, skipping a training session is one of the hardest things you can do, especially when you're in a rhythm and routine. If you're anything like me, it's really tough to miss out, and you can feel like you're falling behind. So waking up feeling ill and seeing a number that says, yes, you actually are unwell, can be really helpful. It backs up your own sense of self and validates your decision not to train.
But it can also be really distressing. A really poor score, or a really high one telling you you're ready to go when your body doesn't feel it at all, can mess with you.
I think it would be an awful thing to wake up on marathon morning and see a Readiness score of one, two or three when that isn't how you're feeling. It gets in your head. If you're anything like me, you just wouldn't look at it on race day. That's not information I'd want to take in.
So should you trust yours?
If a runner asked me that tomorrow, I'd want to know how they're feeling, where they're actually at, and why they're looking at it. What's the score giving you?
The individual pieces of data are useful. Heart rate variability, breathing rate, heart rate, hours slept. Those are all useful bits of information. I'm just not sure you can trust it all rolled together.
Apple's breakdown of a 7 in the Fitness app: what raised it and what lowered it
The whole thing reminds me of the first year our daughter was alive, when my Apple Watch told me I was getting less sleep this year than I had last year. Well, of course I was. I had a newborn. I could see the numbers, but it wasn't as if I could do anything about them, or was going to change anything. It almost felt a little bit like it was taunting me. It didn't understand the full picture, and that frustrated me a little, actually.
What I'd change
If I could change one thing, I'd drop the out of ten and use a traffic light. There'd be some flexibility within it:
Green: the nines and tens, heading down towards amber.
Amber: the middle.
Red: your vital signs are under stress.
But I'd also have it ask me how I'm doing, so it becomes a little morning questionnaire. In the Full Potential app, we've got an emoji you can select for how you're feeling: a smiley face, a middle one or an unhappy one. That's the sort of system I think would be more useful here, one that uses both the data and how you're actually doing to put a recommendation together. Your vitals might be saying middle of the road, but you've told it you're unwell, so it drops you down.
Oh god, that would be amazing, wouldn't it? Maybe I need to build something.
The honest bit
Readiness hasn't changed a single thing I've done, because I trust myself a lot. I look at it when I remember, or when I wonder what today's was, and I might look back at it. But it's not enough to make changes I don't feel I can make myself.
Maybe that's because I've done so much of this sort of thing before, and I feel more empowered to listen to my own body. Maybe I'm more fortunate. I'm not trying to dismiss it as a concept. If you can make it work for you and use it effectively, it can be useful. That's probably just not where I'm at.
I could absolutely live without it. And yet I'm still wearing it all, because it's data, and there's an obsessional part of me that wants to collect and keep hold of every bit of it. It isn't making me change. It's just making me aware.
So look at your score if you're curious. Then ask yourself how you actually feel, and go with that.
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